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Stereoscopic 3D and DisplayPort

01-22-2009, 02:22 PM

Several manufacturers of monitors and graphics cards are now testing the waters for stereoscopic "3D," although they have not converged on a common technology. nVidia seems interested in 120 Hz monitors with active LCD shutter glasses, and others have shown monitors with lenticular or passive polar filter schemes.

It occurs to me that DisplayPort 1.2, which adds support for stereoscopic 3D, might be a superior interconnect for this purpose. DisplayPort uses a pure digital micropacket architecture which is decoupled from the raster arrangement of other interconnects. A graphic card with DisplayPort could simply arrange to ship the appropriate data for two stereoscopic screens worth of data and leave the monitor to handle the specifics of how it is actually displayed. This appears to me to be a very good thing for those who write graphic card drivers.

I suggest using the massive clout of the Linux open source graphic driver community to bring this to the attention of the manufacturers of graphic cards and monitors, for the betterment of mankind.

Comment

I recall that the old 3dfx Voodoo2 was available in a variant with shutter glass interface for 3D images (through the old VGA interface and a 120 Hz capable monitor, no less). It failed to generate much enthusiasm at the time.

That DisplayPort is going to play a major role in the future, both for connecting computers to external displays and notebooks to internal panels, I do not doubt.

To achieve the 21.6 Gbps rate, the per-lane data rate is doubled from 2.7 Gbps to 5.4 Gbps, over the four lanes that exist in the standard cable.For a single display, this enables ... a 3D display (120Hz) at 2560 x 1600.
...
DisplayPort v1.2 also includes improved support for Full HD 3D Stereoscopic displays:
-- Life-like motion using up to 240 frames-per-second in full HD, providing 120 frames-per-second for each eye
-- 3D Stereo transmission format support Field sequential, side by side, pixel interleaved, dual interface, and stacked
-- 3D Stereo display capability declaration Mono, Stereo, 3D Glasses